The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, United States. NIF's mission is to achieve fusion ignition with high energy gain.

NIF is the world’s most precise and reproducible laser system. It precisely guides, amplifies, reflects, and focuses 192 powerful laser beams into a target about the size of a pencil eraser in a few billionths of a second, delivering more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy and 500 trillion watts of peak power.

This is the greatest negative pressure the patient can generate, often also referred to as the NIF (Negative Inspiratory Force). It is measured asking patients to inhale as hard as they can with measurement of the negative pressure that they generate using a pressure gauge (image above).

NIF enables scientists from across the nation and around the world to conduct unprecedented experiments in nuclear physics, high energy density science, materials science, weapon physics, and many other scientific disciplines.

In “indirect drive” inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments on NIF, up to 192 laser beams are fired into a centimeter-sized hollow cylinder called a hohlraum. This generates a “bath” of soft x rays that ablate, or blow off, the surface of a peppercorn-sized capsule suspended in …

On Dec. 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.

National Ignition Facility, laser-based fusion research device, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, U.S. A major goal for the device is to create a self-renewing, or energy-producing, fusion reaction for the first time. Learn more about the NIF.

National Ignition Facility Overview. 1.1. National Ignition Facility and Users. 1.2. History. 2. Governance, Roles and Metrics. 2.1. Governance Plan. 2.2. Time Allocation and Experiment …

Negative inspiratory force (NIF) is the maximum pressure that can be generate against an occluded airway and is a marker of respiratory muscle function and strength. The Negative Inspiratory Force index (NIF) measures the patient’s maximum inhalation effort after exhaling. The patient system is closed during measurement of the NIF.

In a sense NIF, the world’s highest-energy laser system, is one big laser amplifier. As with most large lasers, NIF uses intense flashes of white light from giant flashlamps to “pump” electrons in large slabs of laser glass to a higher-energy state that lasts only about one-millionth of a second.